The word spread through the Death Eater ranks the way wildfire moves — not as an announcement but as a feeling, the sudden collective realisation that the thing holding the network together was gone. Some of them had heard the crack and seen the flash. Most didn't need to see anything. They felt the absence of it.
They ran.
The Ministry Aurors on the perimeter were already moving. Running would not be enough; it would simply determine whether you were captured in five minutes or five hours. A few understood this and surrendered on the spot. The rest would have a long night ahead of them.
Kevin found Hermione by the outer edge of the crowd before the cheering had properly started. He was still dirty from the valley, dried blood on one sleeve from where a rock splinter had caught him, and none of that mattered at all when she appeared through the crowd and broke into a run.
He met her halfway.
She wrapped around him with both arms and both legs and her face pressed into his neck, and she was shaking slightly and he could feel her breathing going unsteady and then steadying, unsteady and steadying, the way breathing went when you'd been holding fear in a closed fist for hours and had finally been allowed to open your hand.
"It's done," he said, into her hair. "Nothing pulling us apart. Not anymore."
She made a sound that wasn't quite a word.
"Don't cry on my robes, Hermione."
She laughed. She couldn't help it, which was the point.
She tipped up on her toes and kissed him with the unselfconscious urgency of someone who has recently spent several hours contemplating a world without this particular person in it.
Kevin kissed her back.
The crowd that had begun to gather around them was doing the polite thing of looking somewhere else while conspicuously remaining nearby.
Eventually she pulled back, straightened herself up with great dignity, and kept hold of his hand. Her cheeks were red. His were too, not that either of them acknowledged it.
Harry caught Kevin's eye from across the small crowd and gave him a thumbs-up. Kevin returned it. Ron was trying and failing to look casual. Draco had turned slightly away, which for Draco was basically an ovation.
Dumbledore and Grindelwald were standing together at the edge of the cleared ground, talking quietly.
Kevin walked over. Dumbledore had the expression of someone working through several large and complicated feelings at his own pace. Grindelwald had the expression of someone thoroughly enjoying the fact that he was currently not the most complicated conversation in Dumbledore's day.
"Headmaster," Kevin said. "Are you going to explain the part where you let Grindelwald run his own operation inside Hogwarts without telling the rest of us?"
"Ahem," Dumbledore said.
Grindelwald clapped him on the shoulder. "Mind your own business, Kevin."
Kevin's fist tightened.
"Gellert," Dumbledore said quietly. "Enough."
Grindelwald removed the hand, moved off a few steps, and occupied himself with something else.
Kevin watched him. The Saints who'd fought alongside them were clustered nearby, waiting. Grindelwald said something to them — low, too quiet to carry — and they came apart. Not angry. Something more like mourning, which Kevin found unexpected. They went to their knees and several of them wept openly. Grindelwald's voice, when it came back to them, was disappointed and final.
They left, heads down, with the air of people who have been very gently told that the thing they've been fighting for is finished and it's time to go home.
Kevin watched them go.
He thought about Grindelwald's plan — the audacity of it, the months of patience it had required, the quiet steady trust in Kevin's ability to survive something Kevin himself had not been certain he could survive. He thought about the fact that it had worked.
He had his opinions. He'd air some of them later.
For now he looked at the valley, and the castle, and the people coming out of it into the late afternoon light. He looked at Hermione beside him, at Harry talking to Ginny, at Ron and Draco somehow sharing the same physical space without either of them catching fire.
He looked at all of it.
He let himself have the feeling.